Outside the Beltway: Americans Angry, But Also Engaged

Yesterday’s Rasmussen poll reveals what anyone who has been watching the news for the past year already knows — Americans are angry. They are angry at their government and its failures to provide solutions to the current problems. According to today’s poll, 75% of likely voters are “at least somewhat angry at the government’s current policies”. The poll also found that a whopping 45% of respondents were in the “Very Angry” category a nine percent increase from earlier this fall.

What the poll didn’t show was that many Americans are not just sitting in their houses stewing. They are getting out of their houses and getting involved. The rise of the Tea Party movement this year is a great example.

Take Tucson, Arizona, where a group of conservative activists took the city’s budget deficits head on in a creative video last month. The City Council has spent the past few months trying to figure out to deal with the shortfalls and these activists have a suggestion — cut unnecessary spending.

The video highlights a program that gave Priuses to each of the member of the city council as well as the efforts of Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik (who declined a Prius) to find other areas of the budget to cut.

The video is an effective example of how ordinary citizens armed with video cameras can argue for conservative principles and hold their government accountable. It also highlights how Americans are not just angry, they are also on the move.

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A Prius for every council member. Fantastic. I guess the upside is that maybe their brakes will fail and soon a new city council will be necessary.

I'm kidding (sort of), but seriously, the reality of just how angry people actually are became clear to me last year when the Tea Party movement was just beginning and the first 'tax day' protests happened. We had one here in lower Manhattan where I live, and I decided to take a walk over and check it out, expecting maybe 200 people or so, which is about average for a conservative-leaning action in liberal NYC.

When around 5,000+ people showed up, on a weekday evening, in liberal downtown Manhattan, to protest government largesse and listen to conservative speakers, thats when I knew this wasn't business as usual anymore. It was a really moving experience to tell you the truth.

It was honestly just ordinary people of all races, religions and backgrounds coming together peacefully to show how upset they were with the current direction of our government. It was business owners and office workers and middle class parents and college students and ordinary people of every stripe you can think of. I know the media likes to paint these protests as a bunch of angry white quasi-racists who are pissed off about things they don't really understand, but that could not have been further from the truth, and our diversity and independence was on full display that night.

Of course the local NY media pretty much ignored it, as did the national mainstream press, preferring instead to focus on the more predictable protests in the south and midwest, where the people are more easily caricatured, but everyone should know that even here in the deep liberal territory of NYC, the message of smaller government is being heard loud and clear by many more people than you'd expect.

I have to agree with Ron Paul and Ellen Hodgson Brown that we need to end the Fiat currency standard. What is gonna happen with this Depression which is slated to go on for another 10 years is the demise of the Dollar and the incorporation of The Amero.

We sure did the right thing by putting Steve in the Council to clean out this mess. . Too bad the other two Republicans didn't get elected. Steve is the only Republican Councilman and is sure showing those Democrats how to do things. Tucson has been run by these power-hungry Democrats far too long.

[…] to retire, further burdening working Americans.It is no wonder a huge majority of Americans are upset and angry with their government. More voters now see President Obama as too confrontational.There is no wonder to look forward […]

[…] There I was, minding my own business at the Tea Party event this past Tuesday (videos pending) and one of the organizers told me that one of the videos I did for Take Back Tucson was featured by the Heritage Foundation last month. Sweet! I had no idea. I checked it out and here’s what I found. […]

[…] There I was, minding my own business at the Tea Party event this past Tuesday (videos pending) and one of the organizers told me that one of the videos I did for Take Back Tucson was featured by the Heritage Foundation last month. Sweet! I had no idea. I checked it out and here’s what I found. […]

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